Eight Smart Ways to Use Gamification In Your Business

Gamification has lately become the tactic for engaging consumers and employees. Here are eight tactics for leveraging it in your business:

A Streak-Based Reward System

Streaks refer to how regularly a player logs into a game. Players are rewarded not just for logging in each day, but also completing certain tasks; this increases the likelihood of their remaining in the game and invest in their progress. There’s a lesson to learn here.

Elements Driving Referrals And Sharing

Think about virality, not just ways to boost consumption. Think about driving referrals and social sharing. Think about achieving a network effect. Seek the synergy of utility, virality, and game theory.

User Opinions

Use gamification to collect opinions on implementing best practices in search of better, more active participation and the pre-empting of potential problems. Good gamification exercises are designed to achieve the required outcomes; a decision, once made, should be shared with all participants.

Employee Training

Growing skill gaps are a big concern for business leaders as companies become digitized at ever faster, and qualified candidates are harder to hire. With gamification, you can quickly retrain existing employees through healthy competition, encouraging them to put their new skill sets into practice.

Simple To Learn, Tough To Master

Victories that are too easy beget lost interest. Easy to understand is good, not so easy to win is better. True skill is required to integrate your product into this game, taking advantage of increased engagement.

Badges – Optional, But Valuable

Badges and tracks that users can follow give them an opportunity to show off those achievements – say, on LinkedIn. This is an example of a gamification soft-sell, which is smart. Gamification shouldn’t be forced on users, especially in a corporate environment.

Driving Sales

Companies are using gamification to combine sales and marketing: e.g. creating a program driven by augmented/virtual reality, having employees play one another, mitigating external threats, and working together remotely. All these can be very useful for selling emerging technologies in a novel way.

Adding Value To The User Experience

Achievements, progress tracking, and scoring can drive engagement through the element of fun, or they can confuse the message and clutter the UI. Avoid these traps by knowing the Why & How of your gamification.